Introduction to Data Management Practices

Description

This workshop in Data Management with an updated curriculum from 2025 will introduce important research data management aspects through lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on computer exercises. The course is intended for researchers who want to take the first steps towards a more systematic and reproducible approach to documenting, describing and managing research data.

This course is delivered once per year but the material is open and available for self-studies at any point.

Topics covered

• Open Science and FAIR in practice
• Organising data, files and folders in research projects
• Describing data with metadata
• Documentation using Markdown
• Publishing data to public data repositories
• Cleaning tabular data and metadata with OpenRefine
• Versioning data, documents and scripts (e.g. by using Git & GitHub)
• Writing Data Management Plans

Links to course modules and repositories, including previously included modules

Module site	Repository
Open Science and FAIR	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-open-science-dm-practices
Data organisation practices	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-organising-data-dm-practices
Metadata	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-metadata-dm-practices
Data publication	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-data-publication-dm-practices
Cleaning tabular data with OpenRefine	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-openrefine-dm-practices
Introduction to scripted analysis with R	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-r-intro-dm-practices
Versioning of Data and Code using Git	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-versioning-dm-practices
Data Management Plans	https://github.com/NBISweden/module-dmp-dm-practices

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, students well be able to:

• Describe some reasons for the principles of Open Science and FAIR
• Organise their project files and folders in a structured way
• Find and select relevant metadata standards for their research project
• Find suitable public repositories for life science data and have an understanding of the requirements for submitting data to them
• Clean up existing tabular data
• Perform basic version control of files and have means to learn more advanced skills
• Have an understanding of the benefits of data management plans (DMPs) and what a DMP should contain

Pre-requisites

No previous programming experience is required, but you are required to bring your own laptop with the required software pre-installed. Installation instructions will be provided before the course starts.

Level

beginner